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Archive for the ‘Promote Your Business’ Category

Anyone who has an online business needs paying customers. In order to convert your website visitors into paying customers, you need to create a sales funnel .

The primary goal for your sales funnel is moving people from one stage to another until they are ready to buy from you.

From the first time your prospects hear about you until the moment of purchase, they pass through different stages of this sales funnel. The journey might be different for each, depending on your buying personas, niche, and the types of products and services you offer.

When designing your sales funnel, you can have as many stages as you want.

Generally, there are four main ones that you need to pay attention to:

Although the rise of video has dominated the content marketing industry for the last couple of years, it’s evident that many people still prefer to read.

While many prefer to watch a video than to read written text, we’re often not able to listen to video, and for many types of content, we still prefer to read. Using article marketing as a part of your overall marketing strategy is a benefit to you.

Here are four good reasons to use article marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy:

To expand your brand visibility on the web
To validate your authority and thought leadership
To enhance your SEO efforts
To create pathways for the people, who want what you’re offering, to find you

Expand your brand visibility on the web

Great content is a relatively inexpensive way to advertise your brand and get more visibility on the web. You must provide quality content in an easy-to-understand manner that addresses the needs or wants of the audience you wish to reach.

Marketing effort builds momentum through consistency. Set up a schedule that works for you and stay with it, say one article per week. Marketing with articles takes time and persistence. It’s not a quick fix for cash flow.

Enhance your SEO efforts

You can enhance your SEO efforts with article marketing by properly using your keywords. Use them in your title, a couple of times within the article, and as a hyperlink that contains your main keyword(s) in your summary, which links back to your product or service by way of a landing page.

Create pathways for the people who want what you’re offering to find you

Create a pathway for people to find what you’re offering by using a landing page, also called a lead capture page. This is a page that has a call to action (CTA) and is connected to a source that collects people’s name and email address so that you can follow up with them to offer more information about your product or service.

As you promote your articles, there is the opportunity for them to go viral.

To have a successful content marketing strategy you will need a variety of different content types, including written blog posts, videos, infographics and webinars.

Search engine bots cannot read videos so you even need text with videos to rank higher in the search engines. You Tube, which is owned by Google, allows a 200-word summary explaining what a video is about. The text needs to be clear, unique and well-written.

You can get information more quickly from a well-written article than a video, because you can skim the article and pick out what is relevant to you. If you’re viewing a video, it’s easy to miss something while scrolling back and forth on the time bar, and it takes up a lot of time.

Use article marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy so you can expand your brand visibility on the web, validate your authority and thought leadership, enhance your SEO efforts and create pathways for the people who want what you’re offering to find you.

The world of online marketing is fast paced and therefore unpredictable. To have success, you must be willing to continually test and refine your campaigns.

Most traditional business experts talk about following the money and not your passion. If you’re too attached to a business, then you won’t be able to see clearly what to do when it’s not going well. You won’t be able to tell if you need to scrap it and start over.

When a prospect or customer signs up to receive your emails, there should be a response sent by an autoresponder. This should happen whenever someone clicks on a link and makes a purchase or when anyone signs up for a newsletter or membership in your program, to show your appreciation for their time and effort.

An autoresponder is a computer program that automatically answers e-mail sent to it. They can be very simple or quite complex. The software sends a sequence of emails to a person who has taken some action. You write the emails, enter them into the autoresponder system, set up the triggering function for the series, and schedule when they should be sent.

Sequence Emails
People generally want more than the initial offering. For example, if readers bought your ebook on the basics of knitting, you could do a sequence of emails beginning with the different types of knitting needles, the second email would be about the yarn, the third on patterns, and so on.

Drip Email Campaign

For readers who are ready to buy something from you, are thinking about it but want more information, and those who are interested in being on your list but don’t know if they want to buy anything right now, use a drip email campaign.

If you had a recent campaign to get more leads by offering something free pertaining to one of your services, and you’ve captured their emails, send this group a series of emails with engaging content about how you created the service to solve a common problem many readers encounter in the running of their business. You can give a case study in one email and another case study in the second email in a story-telling form.

In the bottom of these two emails, offer a short bit of content about your book or service with a link or CTA (call-to-action) button to the book or service on solving the common problem.

Now split your readers into two groups: Those who made a purchase (Group A) and those who didn’t (Group B). Group A will receive automated emails referencing elements of the book shown in emails as to how you can help them be more successful. Once they’ve received a few of the supporting email sequences that may also have links to videos, you can offer your readers a product demo and a free consultation.

In the meantime, Group B is getting occasional automated emails like Group A received, but they also get other emails with different content about other services you provide, including links to content with more information such as a video. Those in Group B who click on the book link show they’re still interested in the book and, potentially, your personalized service but just may not be ready yet.

Webinar Autoresponder Email Series

Marketers like to show their fol­lowers how they can carry out something in their business that will help them make more money. Using the drip email example above, a webinar can be offered at some point for Group A because they showed the most interest in the product.

Group A has already seen a video or two as part of the sequence emails they received. Now you can send an email inviting readers to attend a webinar where they can see the service in action and how it can help them decide on using your product or information. When the webinar invitation goes out, readers fill out the form and send it back. This generates the reservation acceptance email that carries a link that is automatically code-created with that person’s identification and takes the person to the webinar link when the time comes to join up.

A day before the event you send a reminder email and again right before the webinar begins. Readers just need to click on the link several minutes before it starts. The link takes them right to the webinar page where each reader is recognized as a pre-registered attendee (because of the ID link code).

When the webinar is over, get the list of attendees and those who didn’t. Create separate channels (lists) for each group. Put aside those who attended but didn’t sign up for the service.

For the registered non-attendees of Group A in the “drip” campaign, now moved into a Group A short-term email list, send an autoresponder message saying they were missed at the webinar but there’s a link for a replay if they’d still like to see it.

If your short-term list of members clicked on the replay link but not the link to get your service, send an automated email several hours later, asking if they’d like to have a consultation to know more. They can click on a link in the email to generate a callback from you or set up an appointment with you.

After 24 hours, send out another autoresponder email reminding them that the discount will be over in 24 hours, so they need to act now. If no actions were taken, you can move non-responding people to another email list to receive regular emails about products and services you have to offer, including emails that just offer valuable content without any sales approach.

Sequence emails, drip email campaigns, and a webinar autoresponder email series are three types of email campaigns you can set up for a boost to your business.

A sales funnel is the buying process that you use to lead customers or prospective clients through to purchase a product. It is a series of steps within a particular sales model. These steps can consist of landing pages, blog pages, re-targeting ads for bringing people back into the loop if they’ve left, and email follow ups.

Simply put, a sales funnel is the journey you take your website visitors through when trying to sell your products and services to them.

The top of the funnel works to attract people, the middle of the funnel is a kind of nurturing process such as getting people on your email list, and in the bottom you’re doing additional follow up.

Here are four main stages for your sales funnel:

Read magnet
Lead magnet
Introductory offer
Core offer

One strategy you can use to create sales funnel opportunities is to send an email to your list asking them what they need help with, a kind of survey. Your subject line can be, “Can I ask you a question?” Then ask the question.

As people respond, track the common issues or problems that are most popular and use them to create a funnel based on those core needs. You can also incentivize responses by saying you’ll pick a certain number of people to receive a one-on-one 15-minute consultation or whatever else you choose. Now you have a way to address their needs and concerns and a way to get to know and better understand them.

Your Read Magnet makes it all about the reader, before ever asking for the opt-in.

Now that you’ve got your funnel, it’s time to warm up your reader. This can be done by using the survey results to start mapping out a blog post that hits on the one struggle most of your audience is plagued with. Go in-depth with the information.

It doesn’t have to be a blog post. It could be a video, podcast or a Facebook live broadcast that you transcribe and turn into a blog post. Make sure this is all related to the overall purpose of your sales funnel. This should link to your lead magnet which has been included throughout the post.

Your Lead Magnet
Now you want people to see your lead magnet. You can do so by emailing your list with a link to the post, posting the link inside your Facebook group, placing it on your social media channels, and driving some paid traffic, among other things.

You want people on your page consuming content and opting in for your lead magnet, which can be:

Introductory Offer
Once people have opted in, it’s time for an intro offer that is a relevant low-cost offer you make to a new subscriber once they have joined your list. Offer something that is relevant to your funnel and that is hard to say no to, while you “have their attention.”

Each step feeds into the next without any disruptions to the flow. This avoids losing anyone who might otherwise close the window or delete your email.

A few tips…

1) Keep intro offer below $50
2) The offer should be relevant to your read magnet, lead magnet and core offer
3) It should be 10x the value they’ve received in your read magnet and lead magnet
4) It should be offered on the Thank You page once someone opts in for your lead magnet
5) It should not be used as a money-maker, instead use it to change the relationship from subscriber to customer

Now you sell your intro offer through another blog post. Once someone opts in for your lead magnet, they’re redirected to the post that contains something of real value, while they wait for the lead magnet email to arrive. They can only get this by following the instructions and clicking the link to the new post.

You want to keep the reader engaged while moving them down the page to where you present the intro offer for the first time. Now you’re building trust.

Core Offer
Your core offer has to be a great one. It has to be detailed, value-packed and help your customer achieve a specific outcome, goal or result.

A sales funnel gives you leverage and puts you in control to be able to do what you want whether it’s more travel, to stress less about generating leads if you’re selling services or digital products, and growing your business.

Your business has unlimited potential to grow when it targets the internet as its market. You need to have a blog, make sure your website meets your prospects expectations, and don’t stop with just a website.

In the online business world there are three key things needed to grow your business. These Internet Marketing Solutions include targeted traffic, something to sell, and a marketing funnel. These key factors are needed for all products and services sold online.

Targeted Traffic

The first element you need to grow your online business is a steady flow of targeted customers visiting your website and online sales pages. These are people who are…

Email marketing is all about building trust and relationships so people will buy from you and maybe become a repeat customer.

Put your customers first by giving them helpful information and tips before referencing your products or services. Email marketing can be a fast way to reach thousands of customers.

Despite the false predictions by the so-called experts, email is not dead. Yet it’s only getting stronger and more powerful. The year 2017 proved this to all with 59% of marketers choosing email to be the most effective channel for generating the highest revenue.

Content marketing today appears much different than it used to look. There are new tactics, trends, data, and content tools that have transformed our approach, and it’s easy to forget the core purpose of content. There are several things that all brands, marketers, and industry leaders need to know about content marketing today.

It takes effort, you have to be consistent, social media is not the only way to distribute content, plugging your products is not its only function, your blog can’t do it alone, it fuels and offers PR opportunities, and you have to walk before you can run.